My clients often feel isolated as they plan their weddings. They can't talk about the hard parts because people think they're complaining, ungrateful, or second-guessing their choice to get married. But I know something my clients don't: They're not alone. Hear it from people who've been there.

Alexis C.Married October 5, 2013

When it comes to your wedding, what was your...

Worst surprise?

That sometimes, losing weight means your dress fits worse.

I worked really hard on my diet and at the gym in the months preceding my wedding. I felt great until I tried on my wedding dress for my final fitting. I'd lost so much weight in my chest that the top half of my dress — a laced corset — sagged and creased down on the bottom half (where I’d managed not to lose any weight at all, naturally).

After visiting a few different seamstresses it wound up not being anything a good push-up bra and some of those gel inserts couldn't fix, but it was a very unwelcome surprise (and additional expense) in the final weeks in an area I hadn’t anticipated any issues.

Biggest regret?

We should have been more deliberate with who we invited.

We felt obligated to invite a few people we didn't personally care for because they are in a group of friends we largely enjoy (and whom we invited). We'd hoped they would just be cool on a day that was very important to us, and that turned out to not be the case. Invite lists can get incredibly political, but I regret that I got lazy at the end of the process and didn't put my foot down.

Best advice?

Everything in your wedding costs either your money or your time. I strongly recommend considering both finite resources, and being strategic about how and where you invest them.

I got sucked into the thinking that "If it doesn't fit in the budget, I'll just DIY." This turned out to not be a particularly sound strategy, as I am not a DIY-er. I wound up spending a lot of time on these things (even with the magic of YouTube tutorials), and I was generally unhappy with the outcomes because they looked amateurish.

I wish I'd been more realistic about what was a priority enough to warrant me spending the DIY time on it, and what we could have just done without if it didn't fit in the budget. (It was a small venue; did we really need signs at every turn pointing the way to the wedding? Probably not. I still spent SIX HOURS on them.)